Methodology
How these numbers are made, and what they cannot tell you
Most property market commentary quotes a figure without saying where it came from. This page exists so you can decide for yourself how much weight our numbers deserve.
What we measure
We maintain a continuously updated record of property publicly advertised for sale across the Sotogrande market, covering 12 agencies. From each we take the asking price and the built size, and we publish the median — the middle property — for each area.
We use the median rather than the average because a single €20m villa would drag an average upwards and tell you nothing about the market you are actually shopping in.
Counting properties, not listings
A property is not a listing. The same villa may sit on four agencies' books, be published again in three languages, and appear a fifth time under an old reference. Counting rows would roughly double our numbers, and it is the most common way property market figures are inflated — including, we should say, in our own earlier working.
So we collapse them. We keep only what a scraper has seen in the last ten days, drop translated copies of the same property, drop those already identified as duplicates, and then collapse anything advertising an identical size and price in the same area, which in a market this small is not a coincidence. What remains is 943 distinct properties across 12 agencies, current to 2026-09-01.
Of those, 594 carry both a price and a built size and sit in an area with enough stock to publish — those are what the index is calculated from. The remaining 230 are advertised without a price or without a size; we count them as properties on the market but they cannot contribute to a median, and because they cannot be matched on size and price we cannot be certain none of them is a duplicate either.
What we deliberately exclude
- Off-plan and new-build developer stock. Developers price to a launch schedule, not to the resale market. It is reported separately.
- Our own listings. We are connected to businesses that sell property. Their stock is excluded from the index entirely, because an index that measures its own author is not an index.
- Gibraltar. A different market in a different currency. It is not Sotogrande and we do not fold it in.
- Duplicate listings. The same property advertised by three agencies is one property. We also drop the translated copies of a listing that some agencies publish as separate pages.
- Implausible records. Listings with a missing or nonsensical price or size, which would otherwise distort a median.
An area is only published once we hold at least 10 qualifying listings for it. Below that a median is not a measurement, it is an anecdote.
What we cannot tell you
We cannot report achieved sale prices. We see what property is advertised at, not what it changes hands for.
We cannot report sales volumes or absorption. When a listing disappears we do not know whether it sold, was withdrawn, or the agency simply changed its website.
We cannot report time to sell. For the same reason. Any Sotogrande "average days on market" figure you are shown is an estimate, and you are entitled to ask how it was arrived at.
Price movements
We record a price change when a listing we already hold is re-advertised at a different price. We exclude changes larger than 30%, which are almost always a data error rather than a market event, and we exclude listings whose price oscillates between two values, which indicates a fault at the source rather than a seller changing their mind.
Our movement record starts on 1 March 2026. Records from January and February of that year did not meet this standard, and rather than publish them with a caveat we withhold them.
Corrections
If you believe a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will check it. If we are wrong we will change it and say that we have. If a listing of yours is misrepresented in our data, we will correct it — we publish aggregates, so no individual listing of yours appears here in any case.
Ask for an introduction
We do not sell property. What we can do is tell you which firms genuinely work in the part of the market you are looking at — because we measure their books every night — and introduce you to one of them. Not a shortlist of everybody. One or two names, and the reason we chose them.